Menu
Imprint: Bedford Square Publishers
He’s searching the city. She’s dangling in plain sight.
In the Old City of Québec, Kay Harper falls in love with a puppet in the window of the Quatre Mains, a toy shop that is never open. She is spending her summer working as an acrobat with the cirque while her husband, Theo, is translating a biography of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Late one night, Kay fears someone is following her home. Surprised to see that the lights of the toy shop are on and the door is open, she takes shelter inside.
The next morning Theo wakes up to discover his wife is missing. Under police suspicion and frantic at her disappearance, he obsessively searches the streets of the Old City. Meanwhile, Kay has been transformed into a puppet, and is now a prisoner of the back room of the Quatre Mains, trapped with an odd assemblage of puppets from all over the world who can only come alive between the hours of midnight and dawn. The only way she can return to the human world is if Theo can find her and recognize her in her new form. So begins a dual odyssey: of a husband determined to find his wife, and of a woman trapped in a magical world where her life is not her own.
‘At once old and new, borrowed and original, The Motion of Puppets disdains both genre and mainstream expectations to turn readers’ attention to the permeable boundary between life and its mimicry.’ The Washington Post
‘Think of it as Toy Story, if it had been written by Stephen King….Donohue is adept at creating brilliantly imagined worlds that offer both menace and allure. The Motion of Puppets is cunningly strange and hypnotic, and you’re likely to find yourself drawn into its seductive peculiarities….’ Richmond Times-Dispatch
‘A masterpiece of psychological horror…Intricately plotted, absorbing, and suspenseful, this is a moving, modern story set in what feels like a fairy-tale world but is actually terrifyingly realistic.’ Booklist
‘An inventive and suspenseful story told from an original perspective, Donahue’s novel examines how refusing to embrace the present and struggling to escape unavoidable circumstances can alter one’s life forever’ Publishers Weekly